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the sports they play
Revamped, SI Women is for those who do it
By Jeff Bercovici
For most of the history of organized athletics, women’s sports, when they have existed at all, have been more or less invisible.
With a few notable exceptions, such as tennis and gymnastics, most of the attention and virtually all of the money lay in men’s leagues and male-dominated competitions.
That’s changing, and fast.
More and more nowadays, female athletes are grabbing headlines and scoring major endorsement deals, and women’s sports leagues are filling seats and drawing TV viewers.
It is with all this in mind that Time Inc. is preparing to introduce a totally revamped Sports Illustrated Women.
With a new, redesigned issue hitting newsstands Sept. 4, SI Women will publish monthly for the rest of this year before going eight times a year in 2002.
"There's a generation of women now who've grown up with sports as sort of a foundation," says managing editor Susan Casey.
"They don't think of it as special—it's just something they do. It's almost post-gender. At this point I think if you’re a woman in your 20s and you don’t do stuff—yoga, lifting weights, skiing—it’s not considered very cool."
The increase in the number of women who have traded in their pumps for cleats has been anything but subtle.
In 1971, only one in 27 girls played high school sports, according to the Federation of State High School Associations.
By 1998, that number had climbed to one in 2.5, with the result that over 11 million women between the ages of 18 and 34 say they play sports two or more times each week.
Even so, it wasn't until the last few years that women athletes have started to get the kind of press previously reserved for their male counterparts.
It was a trio of red-letter events—the 1996 Summer Olympics, the birth of the Women's National Basketball Association and the dramatic victory of the U.S. team at the 1999 Women's World Cup—that finally succeeded in bringing women's sports into the public eye, says Casey.
"Luckily, at all those events you had a lot of charismatic characters, which helped with mainstream media exposure."
The name "Sports Illustrated Women" (previously "Sports Illustrated for Women") is somewhat misleading, as the magazine is far from being a cut-and-paste knockoff of Sports Illustrated with the genders reversed.
While Sports Illustrated is edited for the guy sitting in the bleachers or in front of the TV, SI Women is geared far more toward the participant, with stories on training regimens, nutrition, equipment and health.
The spectator, however, can still read about the 20 baddest ladies in sports, the boxing match between Laila Ali and Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, and the jealousies, rivalries and friendships on the Women's Tennis Association tour.
Casey cites the latter as an example of a sport in which women's competitions are already attracting more notice than men's, thanks to stars like the Williams sisters, Anna Kournikova and Jennifer Capriati.
"You name for me six larger-than-life athletes in men's tennis. Right now, the women are the name of the game."
There is also plenty of space devoted to adventure—no surprise, given that Casey earlier served as creative director for Outside magazine and is herself a competitive open water swimmer who married a stunt skier.
One feature in the new issue is about underwater cave diving, which Casey describes as "just about every human fear rolled up into one convenient package."
Cutting across conventional magazine categories, SI Women also makes room for athletic fashions, sports-friendly beauty and post-game indulgences, this month featuring a guide to fine tequilas.
"You can’t train all the time," says Casey.
August 28, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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